Metaverse Health

Archive for October, 2008

I noticed this interesting news article at the Thanh Nien Daily.

Essentially, it’s an intensive course running on weekends for two months. On the face of it it seems a useful option for those with issues impacting their lives detrimentally. Looking a little closer though, and the alarm bells start ringing. Take this for example:

During treatment, teens will work with psychologists and health experts to improve their self esteem; develop other interests and teamwork skills; and learn how to avoid temptations.

There’s some big assumptions there on self-esteem and the approach seems very conservative: ‘avoiding temptation’. It’s a tone that will appeal to parents but one that’ll concern the actual target group. The even more obvious question is: who is assessing that the teen is addicted? What assessment criteria are being used?

On the positive side, there does seem to be a little more than the 21st Century equivalent of an AA meeting:

Also included in the program is a “Box of Emotion” where each student is encouraged to write out their emotions and thoughts since the beginning of the program. The box will be opened in the course’s sixth week with participation from the students’ parents.

The treatment approach seems to be one of reality checking with some real-world skill building:

“Most online game addicts fail to face the real world but want to become ‘heroes’ in the virtual world,” Lien said. “[Through the program] we hope to bring them back to the real world and help them discover their own abilities.”

There’s even some good old community and family work involved:

Parents also take part in other social activities with their children like washing their own shirts to donate to disadvantaged students through charitable organizations.

Will it work? Possibly, though to some participants it will feel like hell on earth for the duration. My main concern is defining where intervention actually needs to occur. Forcing people into treatment where there’s no true issue is not a lot different from sending someone to prison for jaywalking.

Delivering health messages to the general public is difficult at the best of times. It’s tough to capture the attention of people when talking about health – unless it’s their area of expertise, most people don’t want to be bothered thinking about their health any more than is strictly necessary. Those who are healthy often take that for granted; those with known health problems often don’t want to have to think about having additional problems. Preventative medicine has not achieved high penetration within public view, let alone getting people to take good care of existing illnesses.

All this is true in the atomic world, where conventional means of education and advertisement have existed for decades. How daunting, then, is it to imagine trying to bring these messages to people through a new medium like digital environments? Even large companies with huge budgets and design teams have had difficulty conveying their messages to people through digital environments.

A large part of the solution lies in a statement that far easier said than carried out: use digital environments to their advantage. Designers need to find ways of conveying their ideas to users in a way that is enhanced by the digital environment. There’s too many examples of stark buildings with uncertain purpose, and montages of bits and pieces of information that could be better displayed and searched through using web pages, in existing health installations in digital environments – this money could have been better spent elsewhere.

One of the big advantages to digital environments is that information can be gathered by users interactively. A display that encourages an action to be carried by the user, and that engages the user, increases the likelihood that they will continue to peruse even static parts of your installation. Moderation is key – some interactivity in some displays is good, but too much can be overwhelming, and can detract from purpose. Also, there is nothing wrong with a bit of fun in health education, and a bit of interactivity can lend itself to the light-hearted, but again, there must be a point to it all, or you will quickly lose your audience.

So I had a bit of a think about the type of interactive display that I, as an end user, might find both useful and engaging, and also that I, as a programmer and animator, might have some ability to construct. This is by no means intended to be an exhaustive list, or an indication of what I believe is most needed, it is intended to assist health care professionals and designers come up with their own notions as to what they might like to contribute to the building of their own installations.

• A garden full of digital plants that closely resemble the atomic versions, in which each of the plants can be clicked on to elicit information about the properties of the plant. This could be used for dispensing information about herbal and traditional remedies, or could give information about the chemical compounds used in modern-day drugs that are sourced from plant matter.
• A display about interactions between commonly prescribed and common over-the-counter drugs. Bottles or packs of the drugs could be on display, and when a user clicks on a bottle or pack a single dose is “consumed” by their avatar. The user can select two or more different drugs to take. Depending on the possible interactions, the avatar can be animated to demonstrate the effect, or simply given a notecard with information about their condition after taking the drugs.
• The mock-up MRI. The user clicks on the apparatus to have their avatar lie down in place. As the bed moves, the user can rotate their camera view around to a screen displaying slices of a normal human body. As another possibility, give the option to display anomalous data and let the user attempt to find the anomaly, testing via a quiz if that seems interesting or useful.
• The “brain storm” exhibit. A possibly artistic representation of the brain with depictions of electrical activity, allowing the user to select whether to view a demonstration of a normal, epileptic or fibromyalgic brain.
• “Pin the bone on the skeleton” – see if users can put a missing bone back in place in a skeleton.
• Avatars can be animated to walk as though they have a physical impairment, and users can attempt to guess what is causing that gait.
• Self-assessment information. How to test yourself at home for a variety of health problems, potentially with demonstrations if applicable.
• First aid classes. This requires the on-going support of an instructor to deliver the course material. This course could bring people into a health-related region, with more extensive static information available for after-class examination.
• Release skins that avatars can wear with bones, or musculature, or arterial, venous or lymphatic systems textured onto them.
• Bots with even a limited capacity for chat. As long as the bot’s abilities are cited up front, this can be a good way of dispensing pertinent user information without having an actual human being at the keyboard.
• Fill a facility with animated bots so that the user ends up perusing a facility to find the bots and see what they are doing. Bot placement and activity might be suggestive of actual staffing levels at an atomic facility.
• Health-based machinima. Use digital environments to create movies that would be overly costly or difficult to create in the atomic world, and then display them in-world.

One further note on information distributed:

It’s been my experience that the information available in health installations in digital worlds has either been insultingly simplistic (for example, the Second Life Main grid is for adults only, and I have seen plenty of information suited to a younger audience) or overly complicated and dense for members of the public. It would be nice to see more examples of grading of information, dispensed through a notecard system, in which the user can choose which grade to read at, and can choose to upgrade when their knowledge and understanding have increased.

Health education for public consumption is tricky. Digital environments are a fantastic way of reaching new niche markets and consolidating new ones. However, the techniques used in the atomic world cannot be simply transported into the digital – keep those in the atomic, if they are working well there. Find the new things that the digital world can do for you and capitalize on those.

The individual ex-addict’s perspective has always held power, no matter the source of the addiction. In the MMO gaming sphere, a recent addition to the blogosphere is ExGamer.net. Run by a 40-year old Canadian guy and 44-year old Dutch woman, it’s a blog in its early stages but it does give some interesting personal insights from a Christian and 12 Step perspective.

Thanks to Adrian Bott at Massively for the heads-up. If you know of other sites providing personal addiction stories with a virtual world context, we’d love to hear from you.